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In handling the baby, let every touch be guided by affection. This demands discipline and allows for no practice. How could we practice something we were born with? The baby shows us our capacity by yielding itself to our care. Dressing the body, undressing the body; watch out for the head. You can do it: loving kindness, with no interruption.

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Contemplation of the baby continues (stops). Wondrous recognition: that irony, mockery, or ridicule are inconceivable here. All the usual artificialities of human distance have evaporated. That is the dignity that imbues the space between us and the baby. Where else is such completeness ever realized, we ask ourselves. Into the dawning of our fear that we could bring something into the world that would destroy this perfection, the baby shrieks with delight.

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Equally beautiful: the baby’s sleeping face, the baby’s face awake. Equilibrium.

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Just watching. Looking at the baby. For minutes. Hours. Day after day. Learning to be: the only – motionless – doing (this is the most important thing: to remain motionless). And not to act. To carry out the most necessary actions with the greatest restraint: not to act. To be like the baby without being a baby. To imitate without imitating. Just watching. Seeing (and as for happiness, just letting it be).

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No chaos in the beginning. No disorder that would ever need to be transformed into its opposite. Everything is clear and evident and visible. This is too much for us. We interpret what is, make a puzzle of it. The obvious eludes us. Like lunatics we seek to understand (a desperation we do not like to admit and that stays with us throughout our life). Simplicity is too simple for us. It’s not due to a lack of good will on our part. It’s due to the chaos we have become. But we were once babies ourselves. Just like you, exactly like you. You must be within us. Exactly the way you lie before us, you must be within us.

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The baby is in pain, completely. We want to console it (faster than we want). Do we want to console this away: being completely in pain? Being at one with pain? The baby accepts consolation, allows itself to be consoled. It takes what comes: pain, consolation. No, the pain is it. Consolation comes from outside. But consolation in our arms has also an inner side, is an inward, indwelling feature of this world. A doubt, which does not interfere with consolation: the baby’s pain and our wish to console have nothing to do with each other.

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A dream chimes in, unsolicited. It’s about the affluent city we are visiting at the moment. About the beggars who are posted at every corner, every passageway, by every bridge and in front of the churches. The beggars all look alike, even male and female are hard to tell apart. Each one bears a picture of his or her family and place of origin. A styrofoam cup from a coffee shop stands in front of each one on the pavement. They all mumble the same words, waving a hand and wishing passersby and their children a good day. Suddenly our baby escapes. Quickly, with swift, nimble motions, like a fish, he glides through the alleys and gives all the beggars coins from our purses. We rush after him but are unable to catch him. Soon we have crossed the entire city, but the baby persists in giving away our money, down to the last coin. Then it turns around, looks at us, shrugs, and snuggles up to the nearest beggar, who holds it to his breast as if it were his own child. We wake up screaming, but it is only me who woke up, and a moment later I realize that I didn’t scream at all.

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Everything that happens, happens spontaneously. If the baby appears to be thinking, we are immediately tempted to assume the opposite. Behind every stirring, especially a stirring of the eye, every glance, and especially when that glance meets our gaze, we imagine something hidden, a secret, a context (preferably that of love). If joy shines out at us, we brim over. If we hear screaming, we are alarmed. The baby’s patience is unfathomable. Every day he practices with us the flux and transience of feeling – and yet succeeds only in nourishing our unbelief in his spontaneity.

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My conviction that what I’m saying makes sense is powerful. I am quite full of myself. And rightly so. I really make an effort. When I speak nonsense, it’s always on purpose. The baby listens to me, no matter what I choose to talk about. Sometimes he responds with something I don’t understand.  Or he’ll pucker his lips. Or turn his hand. I, at any rate, never do anything that might negatively affect our conversation. When you’re silent, I tell him, you’re not really silent. When you make a sound, like the one you just made, you’re not making a sound. Your language is the language of your body. I think there’s something undivided in you that is divided in me. I can speak as if I had no body, as if I could speak without my body. My speech is like thought. I only think that I speak. Here the baby interrupts me. Glances sideways. I too glance sideways.

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You are always there. You’re not a teacher who slinks off on his own. Who ducks away or absconds. You’re not the disappearing kind. You are visible. Audible. Palpable. Breathable. You don’t smell at all like the well-known teachers. Your odor: This is a teacher one can inhale. And exhale. Without remainder. Who, with this scent in their nostrils, would still listen out for the teacher to say the unsayable?